Film Analysis: Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist”

After thinking about this wonderfully beautiful film for almost two months, I finally (perhaps foolishly) feel ready to mutter a few of my frayed synapses’ most muddled concatenations.

I understand that Trier constructed Antichrist in such a way as to be available to a number of interpretations. He does this through utilizing symbols that nod to a number of possible sources.
So while saying that, I do feel that looking at Trier’s pattern of motifs and statements from his body of work one can make better sense of what he’s doing here.

Most informative to Antichrist are the films where Trier re-imagines Christianity: Breaking the Waves, Dancer in The Dark, Dogville, Manderlay. These films are inventive and challenging presentations which riff on themes of The Leap of Faith, and Saint as Martyr usually with the background of human injustice and cruelty.

Antichrist fits right in with these previous films because it immediately requires the viewer to question themselves:
“What is ‘Christ’?”
“What is it to be ‘Anti-Christ’?”

I was very tempted upon finishing Antichrist to pit it as a ‘counter’ or antithesis of the Christ/Saint/Martyr themes of the other films, as though maybe Antichrist was ‘about humanity’ or ‘a view of the world without God.’
I see that this was wrong.
Why?
Because Trier has always asked of us to see each of us as living Christ events. The potential for each of us to perform ‘impossible leaps of faith’ and the non-rational means and often tragic conclusions of these ‘leaps.’
He asks of us to see Christ’s humanity, and humanity’s potential to enact the divine in the midst of our largely banal, cruel, and chaotic world.

So what or who is the Antichrist implied here?
I believe that it is the ‘Chaos that reigns.’
It is meaninglessness, the force that surrounds us at all times that tempts us to see our lives as without order, meaning, without value.
The position that I believe Antichrist takes is that this force of meaningless chaos is real. It is the real state of things. It is however conquerable through our each making a ‘leap of faith’ as it were.
This triumph of the human spirit is not a synthesis or balance of Reason and Intuition, or Order and Chaos–it is the abnegation of these as opposing poles and transcending them in Pure Resolution or Survival.

Antichrist is the description of the triumph that occurs in one’s affirmation of life through their decision or choice. When one accepts the meaningless chaos and still rises with a ‘yes saying’ to life they pass through death and are recreated and mark a ‘Christ event.’

Here’s how I came to this view:

The film begins with a creative act: the act of making love. In the midst of creation, there is loss–in this case the loss of a young life. Decision is definitive. It says yes and it says no. Future is created and possible futures are cast off. We cannot know all the outcomes or consequences of our choices and we must accept that in our life-creation there will be potentially hurtful and destructive effects. This can be one definition for the ‘state of sin’ in the world.

From this moment of ‘decision’ our characters embark on paths that illustrate ways of trying to contain or control chaos. The husband and wife portray different ways that one may ‘wrap their head’ around this existential burden and we see that rationality and madness, science and magic, are just different paths of coping with or trying to control life.

Ultimately the husband finds that these concepts are not enough–one cannot shirk off or end the power of Antichrist. One only can continue, persevere in the face of it.

Integral to this idea in the film is the appearance of bodies in the forest. At first there are only languishing or lifeless bodies covering the forest floor as the couple make love: the quest is almost fulfilled, concepts of madness and reason are being dissolved–
then in the Epilogue we see the weary and battered husband as triumphant and he is joined by fully formed and living people.
These people are the new future, continued possibility, Life flooding towards the Hero of Faith.

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19 Responses to “Film Analysis: Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist””

1. Lame/Incomplete because Dafoe’s character rarely showed his emotions/experience of grieving; only the wife did, thereby showing her as exploited and defective, inferior.
2. Dafoe’s character played the “superior” therapist to his wife, which any “expert” in the field of psychiatry knows is not practiced in professional realms; i.e. a spouse would NEVER be a therapist to their spouse/family member. It’s just not professional, nor advised.
3. The wife’s “issues” of hostility toward her husband (nailing the weight to husband’s leg) were never fully explained or even partially hinted at.
4. The wife’s book subject matter was very obscure and not clear at all, leaving the view very confused.
5. If all the unclarity, obscurity of the film was meant to be cute, artsy, it resulted in being confusing and ridiculous; IMHO.

Karen Beard,
Thank you for writing MindFlowers!
I’m sorry that you didn’t like this film all that much by the sound of it.
Trier certainly has a way of making films that are a ‘project’ to view–I like him and his work very much but even for me I squirm through his films.
Have you seen any Trier that you’ve enjoyed?
If you have any suggestions of films that you would like to see reviewed or analyzed here please let us know!
You may not share in my excitement, but I am looking forward to his new film Melancholia…
Thanks for your comment!

Thanks for your kind, reasoned response to me. No, to be fair to Trier, Antichrist was my “first” of his films that I’ve viewed and I only watched it once. I realize that with most films, they deserve more than one viewing to glean many depths of meaning.
My son and I enjoy many other film directors, so I plan to continue with viewing more of Trier’s films. I, too, am looking forward to viewing Melancholia and hope it’s themes/aspects are more “accessible” to me. After I posted, which upon after thought, I now believe I did so rather hastily, I did go on-line and read a bit more about Trier and viewed some of the other material on the DVD itself about Trier, his life, his perspective, his words, etc. which gave me “more” about Trier and a more in-depth understanding of his perspective, which was helpful for me (huge apology for that gross run-on sentence!)

Please please PLEASE watch “dancer in the dark” and “Dogville” before watching other Trier. I feel Lars work is best understood/appreciated if you take the journey with him rather than join him enroute… The films I suggest are (in my opinion) an accessible place to join Trier and take this journey.

Dancer in the dark initially started to turn me off… “a Bjork musical?” I thought… “OhGodNo!” But as the movie progressed it was a great vehicle for carrying the heroines naivity and breathtakingly beautiful spirit in the midst of human weakness. It unfolds into an absolute gem of a movie.

Dogville is harder to watch but so beautifully executed. Again, I thought “a floorplan instead of a set? OhGodNo!” … but again, Lars knew best – his choice both allowed the actors to shine and stood as a brilliant metaphor as we looked right through the skin into the very souls of the residents of dogville. It is a view of humanity with the walls down : )

Please give both a chance, and then meditate upon the rather more visceral “Antichrist” again. It does take on a very different flavour : )

I cannot say that i understand the movie as is the case with Tarkovsky’s movies. But i feel there is something about the sexes here. Anti Christ has the female sign in it. Charlotte actually killed her son Nic. She saw him go the window when they were making love (she is out of focus in the prologue but when she recalls the moment she sees him). She actually tried to mutilate him before (wrong left/right shoes), and when Dafoe finds out that’s when she attacks him for presuming he will eventually leave her. This explains her attitude regarding the medieval atrocities towards women in her thesis. She finds women are evil and Dafoe criticizes her for this. But she is actually talking about her own feelings as well knowing what they are. When Dafoe kills her and walks away, the whole forest is flooded with women. I am wondering whether it is about the conflict between male and female, not as such, but as symbols of the conflict between thought (Dafoe) and feeling (Charlotte), West and East, Materialism & Idealism. Somehow i also feel that Charlotte ended up with so much hatred just to spite the arrogance of Dafoe’s “smartness”. This is mentioned more than once in the film about him being so smart and all. As if life refuses to be defined, for once you define it, it changes into something else. The truth, told, is a lie. Hence, chaos reigns. And i don’t think there is a solution for this dilemma. There is no salvation. There is simply this. Even if you make a christ like leap, this is still not the totality of life. So the anti christ is the impossibility of christ as a totality. And without totality christ is chaos.
I just saw the movie yesterday and this is like my first impression. It may mean nothing, but could open up some new perspectives.

Dany,
Thank you very much for the comment!
I totally can empathize with your interpretation and I feel there is a lot you bring
to the table that I will have to think about and apply to my vision of the film.
I agree: there is no ‘salvation’…in place of it, there is a messy and compromised
triumph of human will that resurrects oneself in the midst of chaos.
I like what you said about the ‘truth being told is a lie.’
It feels like the damning oppressive force of dogma or the
sentiment of ‘those who know don’t say those who say don’t know.’
Certainly Von Trier’s interpretation of being a misogynist has some validity–
I know that the arguments are there (although I don’t subscribe to them). The issue you bring forth of
the way we see male/female, reason/feeling are present here in the film and I think that you are probably right
that there is more there for me to tease out and unpack. Is it Charlotte’s feeling about women, or Trier’s, or
Christianity’s historical subjugation of women that is being portrayed here? My, it is a dense piece here.
You also bring up the shoes/hobbling of the child–and I think that there could be a whole dissertation about the
way that binding/shackling/imprisoning are depicted in Trier’s body of work.
Thanks again for giving me a lot to think about Dany–
Cheers, Ry-Guy

Lars Von Trier is a brave storyteller. An aside: That penis is a prosthetic. The angle at which it was sticking up was too awkward to be authentic. Why did “she” appear so obsessed with sex? She wasn’t obsessed. She was passive aggressively telling him that sex was all he really cared about.

In allowing her son to jump out of the window, she was sacrificing him to put her husband’s needs first. He demands the use of her body but she can’t keep up with that demand and take care of her son to the best of her ability. So, one of the two has to be sacrificed.

Now that she has given up her son, she expects her husband to accept the sacrificial offering and continue to “use” her. She told him he was indifferent to the death of their son, because that’s what she thinks of him: A sex obsessed man who puts his needs before all else. When he withholds sex and decides that she needs to heal from the loss, her version of reality collapsed, causing her to be overwhelmed with guilt and no way to expurgate it.

There is no social commentary in this film, just a woman overthinking a situation and acting out of misguided ideas. She was crazy to create a zero sum situation in her mind. The reality didn’t match and that’s what pushed her over the edge. The thing she attached to his leg was a device for explaining him what it is like to be weighed down by a situation: marriage, children, and not being able to escape it.

Thanks Mary Lamb! I understand your analysis, you’ve articulated many of my thoughts exactly. I especially appreciate your keen interpretation, and noted some different perspectives than those expressed by Ryan. I definitely attribute our ‘similar interpretations/analysis” of Trier’s ‘Antichrist’ to the fact that we’re both female; Ryan, a male. No harm, no foul, Ryan, not saying anyone’s analysis is “wrong, bad”, just different. And I do believe specific gender oftentimes contributes differently to how one analyzes & concludes; I do NOT believe androgeny serves either females or males well at all (do I sound like an ‘antique’ @ age 57?) 🙂 For instance, I noted Ryan’s minimal, at best, correlation/explanation of Charlotte’s violent, dire actions toward Dafoe’s character (not recalling character’s name) to his actions & being an insensitive, aloof, arrogant, shaming, critical, emotionally manipulative ass to her! Nor do I agree w/Ryan’s suggesting Charlotte’s conflicts stem from issues pertaining to other women and/or Christianity. The past several years I’ve grown weary of Christianity and/or Christians frequently thrown under the bus in dialogues about politics, current events, gender issues, films, music, literature, ad infinitum. I consider the suggestion that an author, director, or character has “issues” due to “oppressive Christianity” to be an intellectually dishonest & elementary maneuver that only serves to cloud & detract from meaningful dialogue & possible resolution (if resolution is desired or intended). As the Mom of a 25yr. old Son I raised as a single parent from ages 3 to 18 when he moved to Chicago, graduating from Univ. of Chicago w/a B.S. in Philosophy & Physics. I find it highly unlikely that while Charlotte’s son ended up being the object of her actions, leading to his death, that the emotional “fuel” energizing such actions was a rift in the Mother-Son relationship. I acknowledge my impartiality informing my thoughts on this analysis & comment, however, I’d submit that it’s this very impartiality that’s provided me with the background & experiences which supports my comment w/credibility. (My initial post on this film expresses similar comments, so am not just cooking something up to provoke, or be contrary w/Ryan or males.) Also watched Melancholia since my first post here, and would enjoy discussing that film. Only my second Trier film, so am still learning about his methods of artistic expression. Also, I couldn’t believe the date of my first post was December 2011! Almost an entire year has passed. . . Hope to read more recent responses for good dialogues! Thanks Mary!

Karen B.
A big kudos for the comments and for keeping the thought-engines roaring here at MindFlowersDotNet
while I have been away on sabbatical.
Your perspective on the film is very interesting for me to read and I do agree with you:
our experiences of gender will certainly affect our stance towards art/film analysis.
I’ve been sorely out of the loop here for a while and I regretfully have not responded to your
comments (or others’) on this mythically grand movie.

I am planning a write up about Melancholia and I hope that you will return to read it and
respond with your views.
A happy 2013, Ryan

Thanks Ryan. Have also watched Melancholia & have a BFF who suffers with severe depression, as well as my 25yr old son. They help me w/perspective tremendously. Me, a 57yr old extrovert (ENTJ) who’s struggled w/ADHD, anxiety & dysthymia (sp? too lazy to look up) (low-grade continuous depression) to their introvert (INTJ) severe depression (neither one in counseling nor on meds). My son & I share a love for similar genre’s & styles of film, and he introduces me to lots of new directors, films, etc. My BFF is a videographer/film editor, so I have wonderful “resources”. David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino & Coen Brothers are a few others we study & enjoy their works.
Look forward to future posts.
Thanks.
Karen B.

Very interesting interpretation. I had only attempted to analyze the film on a more confined scale. My interpretation was an expression of the idea, as Shakespeare would put it, “the devil can site scripture for his own purpose” and I saw the title as being a nod to this. “She” had been completing a thesis on witch hunts and mistreatment of women but whilst writing it decided to reinterpret the research to justify her own impending acts of evil, she consciously sets about becoming the “antichrist” in order to excuse the intentional sacrifice of her son. This is why she demands sex so often and becomes violent towards “he” as well as self harming, she is trying to throw herself into the character of “antichrist” in order to excuse her actions instead of taking personal responsibility; she is just another witch of a women. She fears Edan because this is where she made the decision to harm her child. “He” latter comes to the same conclusion after killing “she”, this is symbolized by the crowd of women, the witches because its easier for him to believe that he killed a witch than that he killed his wife. I also want to mention the animals, I read an explanation of them as being symbols of pain grief (and whatever the other one was) and this does work neatly and the shot of the animals in the epilogue is then nicely linked to the statues in the prologue, creating almost a circular narrative (I’m aware that this isn’t a circular narrative just saying it’s a bit of a wink to one) the story now restarting centralized around his guilt. But on first viewing i saw the animals as the family members; the deer the mother trying to escape her child, the fox the husband pursuing a path of self destruction and the crow the son continuing to haunt them after its death. But to be honest I haven’t done a lot of close reading for this kind of film…

The animals symbolize the three beggars; I’m not sure if they allude to the beggars in russian folklore, who offer compassion through suffering. I did notice the second time I saw the film, three small soldier statues, with the beggars names imprinted on each of them, on top of the desk the child uses to leap off the window. Not sure what to make of that. Is it his desk or hers?

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Interesting points here 🙂 I have just watched this for the second time. The first time I was blown away by the cinematography and the imagery. It has to be the most beautiful and most ugly film I have seen and I love it. My first impression was very strong that it was about postnatal depression and I saw him as the antichrist. As a therapist he should have recognised her condition and helped her before she allowed her child to fall to his death. From before the film began he had been letting her down and given his occupation he was to be held responsible. His arrogance at taking her off medication and treating her himself was unforgivable. The way he used sex to control her – giving it, then denying her, then giving in again – made me feel for her and it gave her actions a sense of being rational in their chaos. It’s almost cause for concern that I connected with her so fiercely and wanted to cry for a week for her pain afterwards. I did not want him to survive but the ending with all the faceless women, tortured and murdered in the past, walking past him alive and well again…perhaps he did not survive after all! The most powerful moment (and there were a few) in the whole film for me was most definitely the deer. The beauty and ugliness of nature, of life and death. Beautiful yet so ugly and repulsive, it makes me feel strange inside. The use of lascia ch’io pianga cannot be ignored either – it starts and ends the film. A beautiful piece of music with such sad lyrics. The fact it is a female vocalist cannot be ignored either and the lyrics must be hers. They translate to: Let me weep for my cruel fate and sigh after freedom!
And let me sigh, sigh after freedom! Let me weep for my cruel fate and sigh after freedom! May sorrow, out of pity, break the ropes of my sufferings, of my sufferings, out of pity. And let me sigh after freedom!

So much more to say about this but not enough time! It is my favourite film ever and I’ll probably never decide exactly what I think it all means 🙂 Enjoy!